A Norman in Catalonia Notes on the fourth Memorandum by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly

Barbey d’Aurevilly did not go beyond the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, at a time when people prided themselves on traveling around it, and he had little to do with travel literature. In his fourth Memorandum, however, he tried his hand at travel writing and even drafted a personal definition of it. This work takes the opportunity to study how he comes to terms with the constraints of the genre, and to evaluate the role played by literary memory and ideological presuppositions in his perception of others.